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Epic Games has released a Preview version of a redesigned Epic Games Launcher for Windows, macOS, and Linux, marking its first official Linux client. The update promises faster cold starts, reduced background resource use, a unified library that can display games from multiple sources, customizable collections, and improved download tracking.
Valve has rolled out a Steam update that adds new Big Picture mode features, speeds up client startup, and improves compatibility with Linux systems. The update is part of Valve's ongoing refinement of Steam's interface and performance.
Epic Games has launched a preview of a redesigned Epic Games Launcher that it says is faster, more responsive, and now supports Linux. The company describes the rebuild as 'vibe coded,' meaning AI agents wrote and reviewed much of the code, according to Martin Keely, Epic's VP and GM of the Epic Games Store and Epic Online Services.
Epic Games has launched a preview of its Epic Games Launcher for Linux and announced it is rebuilding its Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) software, called EAC Linux v2, to eventually support Fortnite on the platform. Epic engineering director Rick Deist said there is no timeline yet for a Linux release of Fortnite, and the company is working with Linux distribution maintainers on security requirements before launch.
Linus Torvalds submitted a set of kernel patches that address a page-cache contention bug causing memory slowdowns on multi-core, multi-thread systems. In his Git submission, Torvalds said the code, test programs, review and first draft of the accompanying text were produced with Claude Code, an AI coding assistant, under his direction. The bug, known since 2024, involves atomic reference-count updates to a shared cache line that force processor cores to compete, slowing performance in workloads with many concurrent small reads.
The Netherlands' Tax and Customs Administration has cancelled its planned migration to Microsoft 365, after roughly 5,000 employees had already switched over. The move follows a June recommendation from the Dutch Advisory Council on ICT Assessment to reverse the public-cloud rollout and a July pause of the plan, though officials have not specified what system will replace it.
A report examines whether open-weight AI models pose greater security risks than closed models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. It notes that closed models are also frequently misused despite stronger built-in defenses, while open models can be more easily scrutinized by outside researchers and used for cyber defense, as seen when Hugging Face relied on an open model to investigate a hack after closed models' security filters blocked its queries.
Linus Torvalds said AI tools are helping spot security vulnerabilities and improve the Linux kernel, but are also burying maintainers in low-quality bug reports and what he called 'mindless band-aid kind of patches.' He reaffirmed that Linux's progress still relies on incremental, small-scale changes rather than sweeping rewrites.
Raspberry Pi OS, a lightweight Linux-based system, only consumes a few hundred megabytes of RAM at idle, far less than Windows or macOS. However, running everyday desktop programs like web browsers can still quickly exhaust the memory on a 1GB Raspberry Pi board, forcing it to swap data to storage and slow down.
In a new essay, Amos Batto argues that the Linux phone market, which stalled after the 2020 launches of the Purism Librem 5 and PINE64 PinePhone, is now positioned for renewed growth. He points to improvements in mobile Linux interfaces like Plasma Mobile and Phosh, plus better distro support for Android-kernel hardware, as key changes since the earlier stagnation.
A Linux developer reverse engineered a commercial spatial-audio effect that made music sound farther away and less fatiguing to the ear, after finding no equivalent tool existed for Linux. Working on PipeWire, they experimented with HRTF datasets, rejecting the anechoic MIT KEMAR recordings in favor of the SADIE II database, which includes room reflections that better matched the sound they remembered.
At the Linux Plumbers Conference in Prague, Meta engineer Gregory Price presented CRAM, a hardware-offloaded memory compression technique for Linux that allows cacheline and byte-level access to compressed data. Unlike ZRAM or Zswap, CRAM represents compressed memory as a private NUMA node rather than a block device, letting the kernel manage it using standard memory semantics like migration and ballooning.